![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png) simont |
Mon 2004-06-07 05:13 |
I mean it in the sense of my emotional reactions, which I see as the part of me that sets the goals my conscious mind then strives to achieve. I think you're using it to refer to the parts of your (originally conscious) thought processes which have become elided into "this is clearly the right answer" shorthands.
I am, but on the other hand the more I inhabit my own brain the more I become convinced that the two parts of the brain you distinguish here are actually largely the same. Trauma, for example - now there's something which is obviously the province of a psychiatrist, and fairly clearly connected to the emotional-reactions concept you describe. You become traumatised when some really horrible thing happens to you in connection with <foo>, and thereafter you have trouble whenever you encounter <foo> because your subconscious has learned to associate <foo> with all manner of bad stuff. But the faculties required for it to learn and generate this behaviour are precisely the same as those required for it to learn to juggle, look three moves ahead in a chess game, solve Net puzzles with barely any conscious thought or stamp on the brake in a car at the first sign of danger. It's all just pattern-matching: picking a complex stimulus out of the surrounding context, recognising it to be similar to something we've seen before, and either suggesting the same response as worked last time, or suggesting avoiding the response that didn't. |
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